The Information Bottleneck

EP16: AI News and Papers

Nov 17, 2025
Dive into the intriguing world of AI as the hosts dissect the quirks of conference review dynamics and the innovation of Kimi K2 thinking. Discover Google's latest TPU advancements and their competition with NVIDIA. The importance of real-world data in robotics takes center stage, while the concept of Chain of Thought Hijacking raises alarms about model vulnerabilities. Simplifying reinforcement learning with JustRL presents new possibilities, and the Cosmos project sparks curiosity around AI-driven scientific discovery.
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ANECDOTE

Hail Mary Paper And Review Reality

  • Ravid described submitting an incomplete "Hail Mary" paper and receiving fair low scores that matched its quality.
  • He used the experience to illustrate that peer review still filters out clearly unsatisfactory work despite noise in borderline cases.
INSIGHT

Kimi K2 Narrows Gaps But Has Limits

  • Kimi K2 narrows the gap with Western models but its 256,000 token context and effective limits (~30k) constrain long-horizon tasks.
  • Ellen valued open-source visibility of training and attention tricks as the key community win.
ADVICE

Force Valid Tool Calls With Structured Output

  • Use structured generation to force valid tool-call outputs and prevent invalid completions.
  • Enable schema-like outputs (JSON/Pydantic) when building agentic systems to increase reliability.
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